Red Hat open sources its PaaS Openshift – welcome OpenShift Origin

A little over a month after intimating its open source intentions, Red Hat reveal OpenShift Origin to the masses to use as they see fit

Red Hat have indeed lived up to their open source pledge
from a month ago, announcing the release of OpenShift
Origin, the open source codebase for their
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

The move marks a seminal moment in the history of Red Hat’s
PaaS, a little over a year since OpenShift emerged at Red Hat
Summit as a service that ran on top of Amazon’s EC2. A quick change
of pace established OpenShift as an enticing enterprise option
amongst the flurry of cloud platforms, defining its merits against
the others quickly.

Unsurprisingly, this was down to its openness and friendliness
to developer communities – links to other services like MongoDB and
Node.js helped, as did the support for applications
written in PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python and Java. Its three
different options of OpenShift Express, Flex and Power (before
a recent unification occurred tying them all together)
allowed enterprises to select the plaftorm most relevant for them,
giving a ‘pick and choose’ element for a variety of
technologies.

Friends within JBoss helped make OpenShift the first PaaS to
offer JavaEE 6 integration with JBoss Tools and other Eclipse-based
IDEs, as well as offering Maven and Jenkins options alongside
this.

It wasn’t exactly surprising that OpenShift took off with its
all-encompassing nature and the community grew from there. This
initiative to give something back should cement an already strong
group of developers behind the project and now is certainly the
right time to go fully open source. It doesn’t take a rocket
scientist to work out that a closed source project doesn’t gain
traction in today’s environment, as VMware’s Cloud Foundry are also
showing at the moment.

Some may be surprised by Red Hat’s decision to open up OpenShift
entirely, but the specs show the entire stack is there.

In the announcement, the team behind OpenShift noted that
‘Origin is intended to serve as the upstream for code and
enhancements for Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS service’ (following the
Fedora model closely) but this gesture was much more than that.
Taking inspiration from JBoss and the Apache Software Foundation,
Origin is set to be a ‘meritocratic community project’ cut free
from developer affiilation and vendors, with a community
process detailed. The codebase is also licensed under
the Apache License,
v2 which will help its cause.

This is especially encouraging as OpenShift realise that vendor
lock-in or perceived vendor control can be particularly damaging to
an open source initiative.

The project will use GitHub as its code repository,
with support like bug trackers provided by Red Hat. Interested in
Origin? Why not check out this Get
Involved page to join the community.
This post by OpenShift Evangelist Mark Atwood helps you
get started by outling the different components of OpenShift and
how to get them running. There’s also this
informative post on the differences between OpenShift Origin
and OpenStack.